House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan Launches Investigation into Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Admission of FBI Evidence Tampering in Trump Mar-a-Lago Case

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) has launched an investigation into Special Counsel Jack Smith following recent admission that some of the evidence in President Trump’s ‘classified’ documents case was altered or manipulated after being seized by the FBI during its raid on Mar-a-Lago.

The Gateway Pundit reported that Jack Smith’s admission came in response to Trump’s co-defendant, Walt Nauta’s, legal team’s concerns about discrepancies in the evidence’s organization.

Walt Nauta, a former White House valet and Navy veteran who later served as a personal staffer at Mar-a-Lago and was indicted alongside Trump last year, claimed through his attorney that the order of items in the seized boxes did not match their scans provided during discovery.

In a late Friday filing, Smith conceded that the FBI had indeed moved documents around within the boxes that contained ‘classified’ information. This directly contradicts earlier Department of Justice (DOJ) assurances to the court that the contents’ arrangement had been preserved intact.

According to a footnote in the motion reviewed by The Gateway Pundit, the FBI messed with the boxes containing the ‘classified’ documents they seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

Footnote 3: The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court. See, e.g., 4/12/24 Hearing Tr. at 65 (Government responding to the Court’s question of whether the boxes were “in their original, intact form as seized” by stating “[t]hey are, with one exception; and that is that the classified documents have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents.”

In August 2022, the DOJ lied to the Court by asserting that the red, blue, and yellow sheets displayed in the widely circulated photo of the ‘classified’ documents indicated their classification status. It turns out they were “slip sheets” the FBI used to replace the so-called classified documents.

The DOJ lied, claiming, “Evidence, thirteen boxes or containers contained documents with classification markings, and in all, over one hundred unique documents with classification markings-that is, more than twice the amount produced on June 3, 2022, in response to the grand jury subpoena were seized. Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status. See, e.g., Attachment F (redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the “45 office”). The classification levels ranged from CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET information, and certain documents included additional sensitive compartments that signify very limited distribution.”

The FBI admitted they messed with Trump’s documents! The FBI used cover sheets as placeholders for the classified documents.

“After the boxes were brought to WFO, the FBI created an index to correlate the documents with classification markings to codes (e.g., document “bb”) and labeled the classified cover sheets in the boxes with the codes for the seized documents. The FBI also generally replaced the handwritten sheets with classified cover sheets annotated with the index code, but regardless, any handwritten sheets that currently remain in the boxes do not represent additional classified documents—they were just not removed when the classified cover sheets with the index code were added. In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.”

Jack Smith also claimed the FBI found so many classified documents that they ran out of ‘slip sheets.’

“The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose, until the FBI ran out because there were so many classified documents, at which point the team began using blank sheets with handwritten notes indicating the classification level of the document(s) seized,” Jack Smith laughably claimed.

In response to these revelations, President Trump took to Truth Social, calling for the arrest of Jack Smith, labeling the prosecution a “sham.”

“ARREST DERANGED JACK SMITH. HE IS A CRIMINAL!” Trump said in a Truth Social post this weekend.

Chairman Jim Jordan expressed grave concern about the justice system’s impartiality and adherence to professional standards within the DOJ.

In a letter addressed to Jeffrey Ragsdale, Counsel of the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), Jordan stated, “This acknowledgment presents grave concerns about the Department’s commitment to impartial justice, whether the Special Counsel’s Office misled a federal court, and whether the Special Counsel’s Office strenuously upheld the highest professional standards of the Department of Justice.”

Jordan demanded that the OPR investigate Jack Smith, Jay Bratt (a senior member of Smith’s office), and other attorneys involved, citing serious ethical lapses in the prosecution.

The House Judiciary Committee has demanded to produce the following documents and information:

• All documents and communications referring or relating to any allegation of ethical impropriety or any OPR investigation concerning the conduct of Jack Smith, Jay Bratt, or any other attorney assigned to work with the Office of Special Counsel Jack Smith;
• All documents and communications referring or relating to the manipulation of documents seized from President Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago; and
• All documents and communications referring or relating to Jay Bratt interactions with Walt Nauta’s defense counsel, including allegations that Bratt attempted to coerce Mr.
Nauta’s cooperation with the government by leveraging the prosect of a judgeship for his counsel.

The deadline set for the DOJ to respond to the Committee’s demands for information and a briefing is 5:00 p.m. on May 20, 2024.

#NEWS: @Jim_Jordan investigates Jack Smith’s acknowledgment that some of the evidence in President Trump’s classified documents case was altered or manipulated after it was seized by the FBI in its raid on Mar-a-Lago. pic.twitter.com/9Qn6h9D3h5

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) May 7, 2024

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